There Are No Answers in Charlotte

Only anger, and conspiracies, and battle lines, and dread.

By
Justin Glawe

Sep 26, 2016

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CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA—Chet McBeath is a white heroin dealer out on probation in here, trying to sort out what to do with the rest of his young life. I met him at Elizabeth Billiards on Sunday night. He sat and watched as a police helicopter circled downtown, shining a blue beam of light on protesters below.

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"When it comes to law enforcement, Charlotte—well, Mecklenburg County, all of it—is still a racist community," McBeath said.

The 23-year-old got two years of probation for his crime—peddling a felonious amount of heroin. A black man he was locked up with got six years, he said. Same crime, different time.

I spent most of Sunday searching for the soul of Charlotte—an authentic dive, a neighborhood hangout, somewhere (or someone) with a story. After many hours, McBeath was the closest thing I could find.

I asked him to describe Charlotte to me—what it means.

"It just doesn't have that…" He paused, his thought coming to an end. "Just doesn't have it. You know what I mean?"

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Following the release of videos showing the police shooting death of Keith Scott, the city is now in recovery mode. Perhaps because they didn't show a gangland execution the way many had figured Scott's death to be, or perhaps because people were worn out after six nights of taking to the streets, protests on Saturday and Sunday night were smaller than earlier this week, when looting, violence, and a street execution carried out by a citizen took place.

"The video doesn't really show much of anything," McBeath said, a mantra repeated by men and women of all races across the city this past weekend.

For some in the black and activist communities here, there is no amount of video that could be released to show police were justified in killing Scott. For some, there is no amount of evidence that would convince anyone that Scott had a gun, as police say, and refused to drop it.

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"How long have they had to edit the tape?" a 26-year-old woman, who told me her name was Justice, said Saturday night. "How do we know that what we're seeing is the truth?"

"How do we know that what we're seeing is the truth?"

Charlotte is simply another repetition of an increasingly well-known pattern. Someone is killed by police, residents are outraged, theories run rampant—Scott was holding a book, not a gun, an assertion that is as factually questionable as his alleged handling of a gun—police refuse to speak about the shooting, and when they do, the video released largely backs up their version of events. Then the streets begin to clear and the preachers come in, promising a god who will bring justice to all in another world, though sometimes it escapes us here. And the angry throngs who busted out windows in a rage a few nights before are nowhere to be found, and a family, perhaps for the first time in the wake of these American tragedies, gets a chance to grieve.

"If the justice system gets it wrong, God will get it right," preacher Dimas Salaberrios said on a street corner here Saturday night.

Still: It is impossible to tell from the videos whether or not Scott was holding a gun during his fatal encounter with police. All we are left with is a body and endless speculation.

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"They need to release all of the tapes," Justice said. Maybe then, the thinking goes, justice might be served.

Justin Carr, allegedly killed on Wednesday night by Rayquan Borum in the midst of protests over Scott's death, was himself the victim of police brutality, a woman argued on Saturday night. "Police dressed up as civilians and killed him," she claimed. As late as Monday morning, CNN hosted a black activist from Charlotte who presented the idea that, because guns and drugs have been planted on black bodies in the past, it is entirely possible that that is what happened Scott.

McBeath doesn't have any such theories on Carr. He doesn't have any theories about Scott, either. He doesn't know. No one knows.

"I might stick around here," he said over a bummed Camel Light on Sunday night. "Once my probation's up, I might stay, I don't know, in the hopes that if something happens here, I might be a part of it."

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